Hour One wants synthetic AI characters to be your digital avatars

If you ever wondered how we’ll populate the metaverse, look no further than Hour One, an Israeli startup that is making replicas of people with AI avatars. These avatars can be a near-perfect visual likeness of you and speak with words fed to them by marketers who want to sell you something. An avatar can speak on your behalf in a digital broadcast when you’re at home watching TV.

Such creations feel like a necessary prerequisite of the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. And the trick: You’ll never know if you’re talking to a real person or one of Hour One’s synthetic people.